Philip Mullen

BY: Lee Snelgrove, former head of One Columbia-Arts

Philip Mullen was born in 1942. He is a practicing artist who earned a PhD at Ohio University and began teaching at USC in 1969. In 1975 his work was included in the Whitney Museum’s Biennial of Contemporary Art. He is the only artist ever to be included in the Whitney Biennial while living in South Carolina. Using this as an opportunity to establish a New York gallery connection he rented most of Andy Warhol’s former factory and lived and worked in it during 1975-76. In 1976 he had the first of 14 solo exhibitions at the David Findlay Galleries in New York. These exhibitions resulted in multiple articles in national magazines and sales in many countries.

His work was also represented in nine solo exhibitions at the Dubins Gallery in Los Angeles. His work has also been shown in many museums including by the Brooklyn Museum, in a Smithsonian Traveling Show, the San Francisco Museum of Art, the Walker Art Center, the Greenville Museum of Art, the Columbia Museum of Art, the Gibbes Museum of Art and the Johnson Collection. 20 works from The James C. Moore, Jr. Collection of the Work of Philip Mullen, which includes 143 works in total, have been on display since 1990 at the Koger Center for the Arts.

In 2000 he was named Distinguished Professor Emeritus at USC. In 2020 he received the Elizabeth O'Neill Verner award for Lifetime Achievement in the Arts.